Personalized Shortcuts

Favourites | Suncentral | Sun Life Financial

Role: Senior UX Lead & Sole UX Designer

Scope: 0→1 Feature Design | Behavioral UX | Design System Innovation

I designed and launched Sun Life’s first company-wide Favourites experience from scratch. As the sole designer, I introduced a new mental model for productivity, enabling advisors to curate their own digital workspaces and creating new, scalable design patterns that have since been adopted across the Sun Life ecosystem.

Introducing a new mental model for productivity in a legacy environment

In a high-pressure financial environment, speed is a competitive advantage. However, Suncentral users, Advisors, Assistants, and Back-Office staff, were losing time navigating a vast architecture of tools, forms, and resources. While the information they needed was available, the path to retrieve it was repetitive and fragmented, forcing users to "re-find" the same items every day.

This project presented three distinct strategic challenges:

The Efficiency Gap: Daily workflows often involved the same 5-10 resources, yet the portal’s structure required users to drill through multiple levels of navigation for every session. This created a "death by a thousand clicks" scenario that impacted overall productivity.
Introducing Personalization: As one of Sun Life’s first forays into a truly personalized experience, the "Favourites" feature had to introduce a new mental model for users who were accustomed to a static, standardized interface.
Design System Limitations: To build a truly functional organization system, we needed UI components (like advanced collapsible folders) that didn't yet exist in the Sun Life design system. The challenge was to innovate new patterns that solved the immediate user need while remaining compliant with global brand standards.

The Goal: My objective was to lead the end-to-end design of a scalable "Favourites" ecosystem. Beyond simply allowing users to "bookmark" items, the goal was to empower them to curate their own digital workspace through custom folders and integrated shortcuts, reducing cognitive load and transforming Suncentral into a truly personalized productivity tool.

Designing and scaling a personalization experience across platforms

The Favourites experience was created from the ground up to provide users with a simple and intuitive way to save, organize, and access relevant content, while establishing a scalable pattern that could be extended across multiple Sun Life platforms.

Key Outcomes

Introduced a new capability for content prioritization
- Enabled users to actively curate and manage important items, improving how they interact with content-heavy environments.
Reduced friction in accessing frequently used content
- Provided a direct path to key items, minimizing reliance on repeated navigation or search.
Established a scalable personalization pattern
- Designed the experience as a flexible system that can be adapted and implemented across multiple portals within Sun Life Financial.
Enabled cross-platform consistency
- Created a unified interaction model that supports a more consistent user experience across different products.

Design Impact

This work extends beyond a single feature by introducing a reusable personalization model across platforms.

Empowers users to prioritize content consistently across tools
Reduces cognitive load when switching between platforms
Contributes to a more cohesive ecosystem of advisor experiences

Learnings & Reflection

Designing for scalability required thinking beyond a single use case and considering how the experience would adapt across different products and contexts.

Key takeaways:

Designing reusable patterns increases long-term product value
Consistency across platforms improves usability and reduces learning curves
System-level thinking enables features to scale without losing clarity

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Discovery & alignment

Aligned with stakeholders to define the goals and scope for introducing personalized shortcuts.

Reviewed product direction and requirements to understand constraints and how the experience should support user needs.

User research, user testing & A/B testing

Conducted user research to understand user expectations around shortcuts and how they approach repetitive tasks.

Gathered insights into:

how users expect shortcuts to behave
how they would discover and apply them in context
what level of flexibility and control they require

Conducted user testing early in the process to validate assumptions and understand user mental models.

Ran A/B tests to compare different approaches and inform direction based on user behavior and preference.

This combined research and testing phase helped define foundational requirements for the system from the start.

Synthesis & user journeys

Synthesized findings into key themes around usability, discoverability, and efficiency expectations.

Mapped user journeys from intent to action to define how users would interact with a completely new shortcut system.

Identified opportunities to reduce friction and ensure the experience was intuitive from first use.

Defining the experience

Defined how personalized shortcuts would be created, accessed, and used within a new system.

Focused on reducing cognitive load and making interactions intuitive in context.

Key decisions centered on simplifying structure and ensuring clarity in how the system behaves.

Design system

Created new components and patterns to support the personalized shortcut experience.

Defined reusable elements needed to ensure consistency, scalability, and clarity across the experience.

Design & iteration

Built high-fidelity wireframes and interface flows to explore how the system would work end-to-end.

Iterated on structure and interaction patterns based on feedback to refine clarity, usability, and consistency.

Ensured the experience worked cohesively as a newly defined system from the ground up.

Collaboration & iteration

Worked closely with product and engineering teams to ensure feasibility and alignment throughout development.

Maintained continuous feedback loops to refine the experience as it evolved.

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Personalized Shortcuts

Favourites | Suncentral | Sun Life Financial

Introducing a new mental model for productivity in a legacy environment

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